Sunday, December 02, 2007

The babbleknot.com team has been gulping diet rockstar & busy adding new forums and features. Currently the board is loading at the rate of about 4,000 new forums per day, with a goal of 150,000 boards during the beta. Just now over half-way there with 78,184 forums loaded.

I continue to be amazed at the variety of boards out there, and the activity that still occurs, even with the popular web 2.0 destinations. I was a fan of King of Queens, but below is a thumbgraph of an entire board dedicated to Leah Remini. Anything is there. You just have to look. In the graph below, the "green" lines are indications of direct replies in threads, which is a clue to relationships between members.

We'll crank up the search & daily indexing rates in the future. Right now, many graphs are done on demand or at the rate of 2,000 per day in a background job. Babbleknot is running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, with plans to add servers for spiders, large graph layout, and other types of large scale analysis as demand increases.

The new features are key milestones that I am happy to finally check off. Here they are in my perceived order of significance.

The biggest new feature in my opinion is background generation of graphs. Before, if you clicked a forum link & the data was unavailable, the board was parsed while you waited, hourglass clocking, driving you crazy. Now if the data isn't on hand, the generation is pushed to the background. Most complete in 30 seconds or so, but a large board with lots of content & posts will obviously take longer. The forum names appear on the right sidebar immediately & will change to a hyperlink once complete. Sending the generation the background is good for both usability & the overall performance of the site. Right now the requests are persisted for the current web session, but the thought is we will keep that history for a short time so you can go back a bit.

Finally, image flagging is now in with very basic functionality. Clicking the red flag next to content image will remove the image from view on subsequent retrieves of that graph. It's possible entire forums should be flagged. To me, flagging isn't necessarily bad. I believe there is a large segment of the population that would probably like to surf only the flagged content & boards. This will eventually become part of the Safe Search feature, which I think I'll brand as an opposite, like Wreckless Search.

More updates coming soon. Please post questions and comments if you love or hate babbleknot.com.

Babbleknot scans the index pages of over 70,000 message boards to generate thread / topic metrics. Things such as velocity, mass, acceleration to name a few. These metrics are used to generate input to a spider that indexes the content and generates graphs of the hot threads.

On the graph above, you see people, threads, and images, with lines representing relationships between objects with a "circular" layout.

Graphs? Why? The graphs provide a top-down view of the content, people and their relationships. You can see 10s, 100s of threads & topics at once. More coming hopefully as we learn to scale. In the future you'll also be able to generate graphs that span boards & forums. The best part of these graphs are that they aren't just static images. You can zoom & pan (screencam), and all the embedded content images are wrapped in a lightbox for easy display and perusal. You have quick access to the thread & user profiles with links representing post responsibility and direct quoting. More coming.

Privacy? Yep, there will be complaints. I expect some push back. I'll be happy to pull any board that doesn't want to be indexed. We'll be respecting robots.txt soon to make that easy.

What else is coming? Identity claiming so you can link your babbleknot.com identity to individual board identities, and delve deeper into your own social graph. Tagging of all kinds is 99% complete & will be on the home page soon. Full content indexing, thread tracking, alerts, content recognition beyond images, more board types, and maybe even posting capability.

Watch this blog for more information and give babbleknot.com a try today.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

It is now up on Amazon EC2. I still have lots of work to do, but it's fun and keeps me out of bars.

I need an artist / partner. I'm great at the back-end stuff, but lousy at the front-end. (or so I'm told)

The easiest way to explain it is that 1) it crawls message boards2) draws pretty pictures3) figures out "who is who", and their relationships4) is great for looking at porn5) and is a privacy nightmare if you use it right

Saturday, June 16, 2007

I am a paying subscriber for the premium package on mlb.com including mlb mosaic. The blackouts have been annoying me lately, especially since they consider the Astros a home team in my zipcode of 75044. (which is North of Dallas)

Today I fired up mosaic? What am I paying for exactly?

The only video available is some crap from the baseball channel. I will not renew next year, for $119.95. I am obviously a sucker.

Monday, February 26, 2007

On Sunday morning I woke before everyone else & went to look for myself. Now, these little guys are pretty small & I had only seen pictures before. Due to the early morning hour, they were still closed, making them harder to spot. I finally stumbled across this one.

I had read that often, when you find one, you find another. These guys are pollinated by ants (among other things) & one theory is that after the ants take the seed, it produces a volatile pheromone that triggers something called the “dead corpse response.” They lose interest and drop the seed. Other ants ignore it as well.

Nearby I found this one.

Now that I had spotted a couple, I started walking the trail back & noticed a few more.

I plan to get out this week during the afternoon and catch them open.

Now, that isn't all. On the way back home, I stopped at a piece of "private property" near my house that has similar wet ground and trees to cover the ground. I was hoping to find a Trout lily, but stumbled across something quite different. I was thankful that it was daytime.

An "open" well just waiting for someone to fall in. I dropped a couple of rocks down... seemed to hit a hard bottom & fall about 20 feet. I couldn't see the bottom. I may head back with a flashlight again & see what is down there.

Another shot. Not much to see... just a hole. Dangerous as hell though.

To be honest, it freaked me out at the time. I recently saw bothThe Ring and Silence of the Lambs and kept thinking about what if I saw a fingernail stuck in the wall. -shudder-

Thursday, January 04, 2007

My wife shot this video of a life-sized T-Rex in the woods at the Heard Museum in McKinney. There is a side-shot at 34 seconds where my son is standing right in front of the "dimosaur" and you can judge the size for your self.